These last few months have presented wonderful opportunities to me. I believe I have made the best use possible of these gifts. I found a job when looked for one. I was able to work and tend to sad family obligations as well. Flexibility is a treasure that few people on this Earth enjoy. We are more and more and more fully-scheduled and consumed by just making ends meet.

Last summer I thought I was just inquiring about a position to have a bit more ease in budgeting after a celebratory month-long trip across country with my husband. A month of travel depleted our coffers so that there was less wiggle room in budgets and covering unexpected expenses. I interviewed for a position just before the trip and soon after I returned, I was offered a six month position in a digitization project at a local university library. The offer was made even though I shared that I would probably have to take time off without much notice as a brother of mine I hadjust visited during part of the month travels was in hospice.

The wages were not high, but the work was easy and allowed me to spend the days listening to audio books as I compared print and digital copies of dissertations and theses. The other workers on the project were good company and smart women. In this case, the pink collar ghetto was not so bad other than pay and benefits. Yes, just those basic reasons for working.

An unexpected benefit of taking this job was being able to listen to audio versions of many of the books I had not been able to find time to actually read in the last few years.

Schedule and Discipline

Other reasons I decided to work full-time, for someone other than myself, included some disorganization and uncertainty that had started to erode at my productivity and focus.

It might seem backwards, but being unable to have the time to do everything I personally wanted to do allowed me to know what I most valued, what I most missed doing.

Sometimes taking a step back from a situation creates an opening that can be filled by inspiration and uncluttered thought. I am a big fan of allowing cream to rise.

I knew that establishing a firm schedule for a few months would help me keep a schedule after the job ended.

Focus

As a person with depression I benefitted from the focus work created. As a writer I draw ideas, words, everything I do or create, from inside myself and the parts of life that are closest to me. A summer visit back to my hometown made it quite apparent that my brother was dying. I lived 2000 miles away. I began to write about him. The sadness and memories of our how our dysfunctional family shaped our lives can consume me if I let it.

Acceptance

I am pleased that I could write cathartically and meaningfully about him. I cherish the gift of being able to write well. But there is a part of me that wants to allow deceased loved ones to transition in peace. I know the transition occurs in my mind. I do not want to encourage the spirit of my loved one to hang around because I cannot let go. I do not know if this is real. But I feel it. I had a tremendously hard time letting go of a dear high school friend who died shortly after her 21st birthday. It took years to be able to release her from being in constantly in my thoughts and dreams.

Trusting Myself

In the last few years I have learned to trust my instincts, so I limited myself during this stressful time shortly after the funeral and for several weeks into the new year. I did not force myself to do more than I could easily do. Easy is not something I do well. But I allowed myself to only do one job, to watch TV, play games on my laptop, and not try to do anything but go to work and do basic household tasks. I have heard that some people actually live their entire lives this way.

Results

What came out of this self-enforced respite is a new direction and a surety of purpose that took me by surprise. I will write about what I discovered and am launching. All I can say today is that I am launching a new site and cannot wait until I can share more information about this logical next step in my writing and business life.

There is a problem in the world. One problem. We are killing ourselves.

We have an inter-connected world in which tiny, myopic, and dysfunctional communities are chafing from rubbing up against communities with opposing and equally dysfunctional bases.

Once the world was a big enough place that opposing ideologies simply widened the geographic distance between themselves and expanded, as the need developed, into places where humans had not yet settled. After that was impossible we then overran or exterminated low population densities of peoples who had the misfortune of being where the better armed or larger group(s) decided to expand.

We have now come to a place where we have to find a different, better, survivable method of dealing with the desire to conquer place and people.

No I am not putting forward a solution. I have ideas as to some of the things that a livable solution might want to incorporate, but I believe that humanity as a whole will have to come up with a solution. That whole will have to value all life, people who look or think differently from themselves, and all the women from those groups. This is the only way I can find to a place where we might be able to come up with a viable way to live together and figure out how to survive the next century or two when everything that has been a given for centuries or millennia will change or disappear.

I believe, and this is personal belief that I would expect any other person to have exactly the same belief, that we are at a very a cultural, earthly tipping point where extinction of humanity and many if not most of Earth’s species along with us is on one side of a narrowing path toward a tipping point where we as a species will fall into rapid movement toward this side or another side where this unsustainable, competitive, territorial, and violence-based cultural system is replaced by a system based on other distinctly different organizing principles such as cooperative distribution systems and speech-based conflict resolution.

All I know for sure is that we cannot continue to exist if the only thing all people do is develop new ways to kill each other and ultimately ourselves.

Solutions anyone?

I know we will need a better understanding of what is going on around us if we are to evolve culturally. For example, where do you think the biggest loss of life to terrorism occurred last week? If you said France, you need to change how and where you get your news. Your task if you don’t know is to find out where over 2000 people were killed last week. Let’s all expand our micro-focus beyond our own tiny neighborhoods.

My next post will provide the answer to the question I asked in the previous paragraph.

I could not really write about 9/11 yesterday. I want my normal back. But that will never happen. The world is the world, and we are the ones living this moment and creating the future. Part of me is angry. My life was uprooted and totally changed by what happened on September 11th. I wrote about it on BlogHer on May 2nd, 2011, the day after President Obama announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed. I want to re-share it here on this blog. The BlogHer url is http://www.blogher.com/realizing-i-was-impacted-terrorism.

On Realizing I Was Impacted by Terrorism

May 2, 2011

I’m still trying to wrap my head around the last 12 hours of world event news.

The bombing of the Pentagon and WTC Twin Towers changed the course of my life in very significant ways. While I was initially worried about my step-daughter, who was at work a few blocks away from the WTC in NYC, my concern soon shifted. We heard from my step-daughter fairly soon after the plane strikes and knew she was ok. We knew people who worked in the WTC who got out, although for a while we did not know if they were safe or not, but they were. They worked on the 23rd floor. But that was it for direct impact on my life. Like most of the nation I was connected to the events of that day primarily through media coverage.

Indirect impact that day was far more significant for me. My sixth grader was so upset by the attacks that the school called me to ask how I wanted them to proceed with her. She had visited the WTC the previous month with her dad and knew the place and scale of what was happening in a way that most kids from Tucson could not. Her sister was safe but she lived in that city.

I had worked for several years as the head of the security section at a major anthropological museum. I received training in cultural property protection coordinated by the Smithsonian and partially funded by the Getty. My thoughts were about evacuation routes, responders, and infrastructure and the magnitude of what was transpiring. Then like everyone else I mourned. Then I watched the whole world reach out to us and our leadership at that time choose how to react to that embrace of good will.

In October of 2001, a month after the attacks, my husband was contacted by the head of the section at the National Science Foundation with whom he had a fair amount of contact during the first 15 years of his professional career. That gentleman told him they were having absolutely no one express interest in starting a rotation as a grant reviewer for the period beginning the following summer in 2002. They had slots they could not fill. The NSF brings academic and scientific professionals from various research areas to Arlington, VA to rotate through the Foundation for a year or two so evaluations of research proposals are headed up by people actively involved in the research area within which the proposal falls.

Unlike most academics, my husband had done a stint in the military after the draft was eliminated and before he finished his education. We are progressives and we are very patriotic. We decided it was our duty to help keep part of the cycle of scientific inquiry in our country going after the attacks. It was the least we could do. So we uprooted our family over the protests of our preteen daughter, who bemoaned that she would absolutely die if we took her away from her friends, and moved across the country to the Ballston area a couple of miles or so away from the Pentagon in a lovely little neighborhood just off Highway 50. Our daughter went to school that next year with kids whose parents had been killed in the Pentagon attack. It was a good year for us in all regards but financial. We went into debt with the moves and inability to rent our home in Tucson for the whole time, and the extra expense of living in a costly city. It was life-changing.

I expected surgical strikes and undercover ops would take out the Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden within a year or so from the time of the attacks. I did not expect the vast constriction of our rights as Americans nor did I expect the blatant misdirection of our precious resources and lives in war toward a land, against a people, and despot who had absolutely nothing to do with the heinous attacks on the U.S. on Septemberr 11, 2001.

Living just outside the Beltway made me aware of politics in, for me, a very new way. We didn’t have a television that year, but we did have internet, radio, and newspapers. I watched a group of women vigil in front of the Whitehouse, starting in November of 2002, against the invasion of Iraq that the Bush administration seemed hell bent on accomplishing no matter what. I watched huge, absolutely HUGE, anti-war marches in the winter receive practically no news coverage. I began to join in those peace marches in February and March of 2003. I marched with CODEPINK, in their first march, on International Women’s Day, March 8, 2003.

We had been attacked, our land and people assaulted and killed, I allowed my family’s entire life to be upturned so that in some small way terror would not win by disrupting our country’s way of life. I knew there were countless Americans who had made far larger changes to their lives and offered up sacrifices of their lives to serve our country, so I didn’t think much about what our little family had done until our administration insulted and in many ways desecrated the memory of all those who died in the attacks on our country and in the initial attacks in Afghanistan by focusing our country’s energies and sacrifices in a political and economic vendetta against Iraq. Wrapping my home in plastic and sealing it with duct tape just isn’t my way. I wrote about it email lists and friends. I blogged about it a bit. I had to do more. My way is to react consciously and purposively. My father taught me that. We have civic responsibilities and they are precious.

Back in Arizona in April of 2004, I joined together with a few other women and began to bring the PINK message of peace to Arizona through CODEPINK Women for Peace actions. I liked the spontaneous, truly grassroots, and positively focused organic, interconnected nature of the links between individual women that made us respected by the peace and justice community and detested and vilified by the far right wing. I felt my actions were patriotic and proudly still feel so.

Since that time, I have had my patriotism questioned, had my life threatened, been called reprehensible names, and had my resolve and heart hardened. I’ve given up time with my daughter as she grew up so that I might return to D.C. with other women to press the peace and justice message forward and keep it visible so that no one would forget that our country is about plurality and diverse belief systems working together for democratic principles. I was removed from Senate Committee meetings on May 17, 2006 when I could not contain myself and shouted out, “Liar” to Rumsfeld as he ended a report to Armed Services Committee. I helped start the house in D.C. that grew into an “official” Pink House that housed women from around the country for a week or two when they could travel to D.C. in order to let officials know there were and are other views in the country that did not support our men and women being killed and our country being bankrupted and our constitution violated.
Even when I had briefly moved back to Indiana to take care of my mother so that she might leave this world in her own home of 60 plus years, I managed to bring a bit of PINK to Fort Wayne to brighten the peace message that has been a constant in that agrarian and blue collar part of the world through the message of Church of the Brethren, Mennonite and Amish faiths as well as the progressive political community.

It is from this lens through which I have to view the death of Osama bin Laden. I wasn’t filled with joy when I heard the news of his death. Neither was I sad. I’ve become very measured in my response to war. I am on discussion lists where almost every day I read about the deaths of young children from drone attacks. I hate war. I hate violent death. I hate what we do to each other. As I wrote in a rather inarticulate post shortly after I learned of bin Laden’s death, my husband I opened a bottle of wine and toasted. The toast was, “May our troops come home soon.”

I was trying to not make my response to this into a political statement. But everything we do has political impact. We make political choices in everything we do, even if we do not consciously understand or want to think about that. I mean that. The most important thing I have brought into my conscious life since I joined with the efforts of thousands of other women in the U.S. and around the world who work for peace is that every little thing we do, say, or think has consequence.

Mother’s Day is coming this weekend. It seems like a good time to remember the call of Julia Ward Howe, yes the same person who wrote the words to The Battle Hymn of the Republic, when she wrote another document in 1870 when she issued her:

Mother’s Day Proclamation for Peace

Arise then…women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
“We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
Blood does not wipe out dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace…
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God –
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

This week I will reflect on where I should aim my efforts in the next 10 years. These last 10 years were not a concrete block of time for me until last night. I have been putting all my efforts into starting a business these last few months. Everything somehow changed again in the last couple of days. This week I will reflect on these past few years and where my next 10 years of effort in this world might be placed. I need to do this. Until I sat down this morning to write my reaction to the death of Osama bin Laden that our President announced last night, I didn’t really grasp how much my life has been directed by actions and reactions to things that this man set in motion. I’m pretty sure I met extremists who worked with bin Laden when I worked at the University Library here in Tucson. I first worked in current periodicals where international newspapers were available. This was during the time when Al Qaeda in the U.S. was head quartered here. An islamic cleric was murdered here during that time. Later when I worked at a museum here I became aware of FBI agents specifically using our buildings for terrorist related training exercises. More was going on around me in my daily life than I ever dreamed. These things have impact. We cannot ever know all the impact single actions may take, but we can know they are vast and immeasurable.
I need a week, I’m giving myself until Mother’s Day, to contemplate the past ten years and the next ten years. What are you doing differently this week?

—–

If I did not wave the flag yesterday, perhaps you will understand why. Perhaps you will not. I still have questions. I am still angry with the Bush Administration and how they dishonored us all with their actions. Flag waving is for parades. I live my patriotism. My hurt is so much bigger than what I can express in a single day, one day a year.

If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride. That is what the old saying, sooth or otherwise, announced to the children to whom it was taught along with nursery rhymes, counting songs and the like. “I learned this when I was little,” was what my Mom would tell me when she was teaching me things she learned as a child. Sometimes she would add information about who taught it to her, or her surrounding when she learned it. No matter how the nuances split away from the main story to create the specifics of the thing she was teaching me, I recognized the main big lesson that underlay them all was that things repeat, life is a line that spirals circularly through time creating the illusion of sameness or repetition. Someone taught her, and now she teaches me, and someday I will teach others. I had the comfort of knowing this was true, that life had constants and I was a part of that cycle.

I so wish every state had a repository of women's knowledge. One of the great things about the beginning maturation of the internet is that women are using it to collectively share, and also archive, women's knowledge in a way that has not only been not only difficult but discouraged for centuries, if not for millennia. It should be a place for women to write, to study, for projects focused on preserving previous generations knowledge and skills in all areas.

Women's culture is different, and more expansive, than men's culture. I won't argue that point here. It is a given in my understanding of the world. I see it everyday in the groups I follow and in which I participate. I participate in a group called, GBE2, for bloggers. Every week the organizer of the group posts a writing prompt for the week. This week the prompt is free writing. This is my free writing product that happens to incorporate the prompts for the previous three weeks as well.

Like this:

It had not been a great week leading up to my beautiful, silly dog, Mr. Worf, dying from an attack by Africanized bees the day before my 55th birthday.

I suffered from medical abuse as a child and interaction with my family can dredge up lots of stress and sadness. With every passing year I understand more and more of the glaringly maladaptive communication patterns my family accepted as normal. I just last week had a particularly distressing interaction with family members over tax payments on a bit of land we jointly inherited. Even though I moved to the other side of the country to start a more normal life to minimize the frequency of hurtful reminders, such reminders naturally exist in the honest life I have tried to build for myself. I became quite sad when talking to a sister-in-law reminded me of how much unhappiness can come to so many when a person choses to act dishonestly, unethically, or solely in their own self interest.

Even though I consider myself a pretty successful person who manages her severe depression pretty darn well these days, family-related funks I experience can demoralize and demotivate me when they reverberate like a strong sound wave throughout my being with a particularly meaningful tone. I allowed the house to become messy, seemed distant to my husband, who is also a child abuse survivor, and we both ended up having a particularly nasty argument from the immature vantage points of our separate corners in the boxing rink where we both retreated with the tantrum clenched fists of the wounded children we both have inside. The argumnent happened over finances, like so many other marriage arguments do, in the early hours of Mothers Day.

I knew this day would be difficult because my little girl graduated and moved to the northern reaches of midwest a few months ago. But the family funk topped off with an argument turned the day into a dark and unfortunately familiar unpleasant place where I just could not connect with any happiness, calmness, or positive mindset.

It took a couple days but by Tuesday afternoon I was headed out of the funk. I wend shoe shopping an early birthday present for myself and found two adorable pair of sandals at a discount store for a gonga deal. My hubby and I were starting to chat normally again when the horrible day before my birthday happened.

I spent my birthday mourning the loss of a dear pet, who was as much friend as pet. It sucked. But out of that day friends from around the country, people I know primarily from game playing, and neighbors, and yes you, you dear readers, offered me touching messages of sympathy, affirmations of friendship, hugs, calls of concern, and expressions of the sadness they and you all too felt. Birthday wishes tempered with sympathy came from husband, step-daughter, and daughter. This real touching outreach of human to human comfort touched me deeply and helped me get through the worst birthday of my life and come out on the other side of that day, into today, with a renewed appreciation of all the miracles of connection that life offers. Life is relationships, and I’m so grateful for the beautiful friendships and sharing I have had and will continue to have with friends,and readers, and even with earthly spirits that through an accident of birth we call family.

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About Me

I have written and published many blogs over the last 15 years on the topics of Later Born Baby Boomers, Peace & Justice Activism, Virtual Worlds, Gene Stratton-Porter, and Medical Child Abuse. I love research, information and the quest for knowledge. I'm an anthropologist by training, and a freelance content creator by vocation. I love things that make sense, could be, and might be so I enjoy good speculative fiction along the lines of Cory Doctorow and TV shows like Dr. Who and Orphan Black.